'Nam

Finally finished watching The Vietnam War documentary today.  Boy, what a slog - about 18 hours total, I must have fallen asleep at least 5 times at various points of trying to watch it.  Having said that, it was very good, very informative and surprisingly quite objective - giving voice to the Vietnamese as much as the Americans.  It has been criticized as not being very pro-American - but given how poorly conceived and executed the war was, I thought it was a fair reflection of what a senseless tragedy and waste of life it was (especially to the Vietnamese people).  What is clear is that my knowledge of the Vietnam War was not as extensive as I thought - e.g. I had no idea who Le Duan was until watching this.  I covered the Cold War in GCSE History, but I remember more about the Korean War than the Vietnam War and so I learnt a lot more about a war that is the backdrop to many of my favorite films.  And to think I have also visited Hanoi and seen the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh - with so little context to who he was and where I was.  What was also interesting to me were the parallels between then and now - in Trump we have a Nixon-esque president, the polarization of people and protests against the war are almost identical to the protests we have now against Trump, and in the last episode seeing all these Vietnamese refugees on the water is so very similar to the refugees we see in the Mediterranean Sea.  "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it" indeed.